Yesterday, I referred to a podcast I’d recently listened to–one that won’t leave my mind. It was an interview by Jen Hatmaker of her nineteen year old daughter, Sidney.
Where were you at age nineteen? Were you super wise and full of insight? As a nineteen year old, I myself had a serious boyfriend. I didn’t know what I wanted from life (which happens to be a pretty typical nineteen-year old-conundrum), the options overwhelmed me, and I was an anxious mess. They say the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until the age of 25. My twenty-one year old self would argue this, as she had been married five years by the age of 25. But my older self looks back more honestly. I know I had some awfully immature thinking well beyond age 25.
Sidney Hatmaker is nineteen. She is gay, so the podcast announced. It was no news to the elder Hatmaker, who, six years earlier, at about the time she rearranged her faith worldview, was deciding how to raise a homosexual daughter. Thirteen–she would have been thirteen.
This guts me. A child going through puberty, a girl wondering about her place in the world. Asking questions, curious, a bit lost, suddenly being introduced to new feelings and ideas. Doubting her barely-established principles and belief system, shaky at best, prompted by the culture to model adult feelings and expressions. At thirteen.
The Hatmaker interview was a first public plea of sorts, an emotional mother-and-daughter co-urging for acceptance. The mother asks what she should have done, what we should be doing now, and how she can support Sidney now, and encourage others to row the same boat. As Sidney responds, I am thinking of my own daughter, the little girl I forced to go to her room and lay down for a nap today, even as she kicked at the door and pounded the walls, angry I suggested such a thing.
I am thinking about me at thirteen, full of longing to be accepted and loved.
Me at nineteen on anxiety meds.
I am thinking as a 36-year old woman who has years of maturity on my side, thankful my prefrontal cortex is developed.
And I am disturbed.
Sidney Hatmaker’s words are petulant and bitter. She rails at the church and Bible teachers who cite Scripture to show what God says about sexual deviance. She is mad. She says how it destroyed her, as a young teenager, to hear Christian leaders teach what the Bible says about sexual sin. She just wants love and acceptance. She cannot fight, she says. Her fight is all gone.
And her mother is proud. She says she cannot wait to meet the woman Sidney will someday marry. Jen Hatmaker warns the listening audience:
I want us to have a reckoning together…that…when we refuse to cherish and affirm the LGBTQ community including our kids, we are literally breaking their hearts. We are breaking their bodies. We are breaking their life. This is not neutral. This is not a difference of opinion. This is causing harm and trauma and suffering.
Let me explain why this ought to make Christ-followers shudder:
Hatmaker is not suggesting you agree with her. She is drawing a corollary between the rising death rates of LGBTQ teens and churches refusing to pat them on the back for their troubles. In other words, this morally despicable situation is your fault. This mess of sexual deviance that leads to abuse, confusion, and self-loathing is actually your fault. You are killing them.
The blame is palpable. The hate is thick. The lack of personal responsibility is unbelievable. Jen Hatmaker is a bully.
I hope you recognize this particular tree by her fruit.
When you leave the door wide open, all the flies get in the kitchen. It is no wonder the Hatmakers are swatting everyone within range.
Maybe it looks like freedom, to form an identity so young. Maybe there is a sense of actualization, a coming of age responsibility in modern times, to be “out”. But in Song of Solomon, the much-read, racy love song of the Old Testament, there is a warning. Do not awaken love until it desires.
Attraction, infatuation, misunderstanding–these are hallmarks of adolescence, aren’t they? But they are not necessarily markers of love. In a young adolescent, they merely indicate development, hormones, growing up. Thirteen must be a safe place to lean into maturity, not a time for sussing out sexual feelings.
It makes me wonder–could it also be the result of irresponsible parenting–not equipping our kids, not preparing them with a solid foundation that recognizes wickedness in the world?
There is no greater harm, trauma, and suffering than that faced by a child sentenced to hopelessness, forever cheated out of abundant life. There is nothing that will devastate our children more than a culture norm of nihilism, void of morals and boundaries, where sex is cheapened, lust is encouraged, and suicide is prescribed as relief from pain.
This takes energy and awareness on a parent’s end. It is up to mom and dad to protect, monitor, and manage that which an older child is still too young to handle…whether they want to or not. What is the world saying? Where are my feet planted?–these are the two fundamental questions a thirteen year old can handle. And we, as parents, have the honor, the special, intimate duty to remind them. You are loved right here, and there’s no need to look anywhere else.
We build, little by little, safely and securely, into our kids, that they will understand someday what Solomon wrote: Do not awaken love until it desires.
We cannot truly say we love our children if we do not equip them for life in this world, if we don’t allow maturity to take its time and prepare its way. We cannot say we love them if we manipulate our precious kids away from God under the pretense of what is culturally acceptable, or where the wind is blowing. After all, there are still places in this world where fathers and mothers don’t bat an eye when burning their children in a fire dedicated to Molech.
But we share a Father who made them and loves them and has a purpose for them, no matter what the world is saying. And when we focus on this one singular goal, to glorify God, we do whatever it takes to keep our kids out of the fire.
We become parents who model our perfect, loving Father. And because He is a strict, holy Daddy, God “disciplines those he loves” (Proverbs 3:12)–we do, too.
“Discipline your child, for there is hope. Do not be party unto his death,” another proverb warns (Proverbs 19:18).
This is not punishment for having a naughty thought, but dusting off their bottoms when they fall and gently, sternly, setting them back on the path. This is age appropriate, contextual learning, always driven by a desire to honor God and respect the child we are training. This is erecting boundaries for your thirteen year old, assuring her she doesn’t need to worry about sex right now, doesn’t need to infatuate over feelings, doesn’t need to awaken love until it so desires.
Boy, did I need to hear that when I was thirteen.
Mrs. Hatmaker feels quite liberated to preach an anti-Gospel. It is opposed to Christ. Millions of people listen to her and are swayed by clever wording and a false message. When Paul was met with opposition who tried to turn people against the faith (a spiritual bully of sorts), he looked straight at the man (Elymas) and said,
“You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?” (Acts 13:10)
I want to be clear: I am not railing on folks caught up in sexual sin. We all struggle with living in the flesh, pounding the same dirt. I’m railing on those who promote it, those who tie millstones around necks and direct folks off the nearest cliff.
I am railing against the Prince of the Powers of the Air. The King of Liars. The one who has an official title of destroyer of souls. The one with a ticket for our arrest. The Accuser himself.
He is whispering in the ears of people you love, making them captive to their own emotions. Love parades? He “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).
This faux-angel delights in twisted words and double standards. He loves holding the bar of equality, social justice, and many lofty, humanistic pursuits–every false idol–in his hand.
When we join his ranks, he feeds the lies right into our mind and out our lips. approving and accepting homosexual behavior is kind. That it isn’t soul-destroying, but life-giving.
But we are to preach the Gospel–the one and only, where Jesus’ blood was spilled and our guilt is wiped out. How we are given power over our temptations. How sex and lust cannot control a person entrusted to the Lord. How we are given new life and promised a new body of our own after this life is over.
There is a big difference.
I wonder–in what other ways are we being bullied into believing another gospel? In what ways are our kids open to the flaming arrows aimed at their very soul (Ephesians 6:16)?
What are some truths you needed to hear when you were thirteen or nineteen? Can you share them with someone you love?
